Thursday, January 07, 2021


'White Privilege on Steroids': Ire After Pro-Trump Mob Gets Red Carpet Compared to Black Lives Matter

Had the Capitol insurrectionists "been Black and Brown," they "wouldn't have made it up those steps," asserted Rep. Cori Bush. 


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Police brutally cleared Black Lives Matter protesters from near the White House in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2020. (Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images)

A Black Lives Matter protester is assaulted by a police officer during a June 1, 2020 Washington, D.C. protest against the police killing of unarmed Black man George Floyd in Minneapolis. (Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images)

For many Black Americans, Wednesday's deadly mob insurrection in Washington, D.C. and the manner in which it was managed by police was yet the latest affirmation of the double standards inherent in a nation built upon a foundation of slavery—in the case of the U.S. Capitol literally so—and enduring racial oppression.

"We must acknowledge the profound inequity of a broken system that allows peaceful protesters to get tear-gassed for a photo op, while domestic terrorists who storm the Capitol in a violent coup attempt get to roam the streets freely."
—Rep. Barbara Lee 

Incited by calls from President Donald Trump and his leading accolytes to "take back our country" in a "trial by combat," hundreds of die-hard loyalists—almost all of them white—violently attacked the beating heart of American democracy while lawmakers attempted to perform their crucial duty. 

Some of the police officers stood aside and even opened the gates so the insurrectionists, some reportedly armed with guns and bombs, could rush in. Others scaled walls and surged past overwhelmed officers to join the marauding MAGA mob inside. Many of the attackers appeared unopposed as they ransacked and looted the place while lawmakers and staff fled for their lives. 

When police finally regained control of the building, some of them laughed and posed for selfies with the seditious invaders. Another officer held hands with a trespasser to help her down the Capitol steps. 

The contrast between Wednesday's attempted coup against the United States government and police treatment of Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C. and around the country in recent years is, as numerous observers have noted, "black and white." 

"It's definitely a difference," Lecia Brooks, chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Globe and Mail. "It is a starkly different picture when the protesters are white. This is white privilege. These Trump supporters can walk boldly in to take over the... Capitol." 

When racial justice advocates peacefully protested in Washington last summer for Black lives cut short by police and white supremacist violence, the response from law enforcement was swift and brutal.

Although the protesters were a block away from the White House and did not attempt to breach its grounds, thousands of heavily armed federal and local law enforcement officers, backed by military air support and surveillance, were deployed to brutally disperse them so that Trump could make his way to a nearby church to pose for a photo with a Bible. 

It was a scene repeated around the nation during Black Lives Matter protests in recent years. Indigenous, anti-war, and other protesters have experienced similarly horrific violence. But Blacks have borne the brunt of such brutality ever since they started standing up for their lives, their dignity, and their equality. 

"White privilege is on display like never before in the U.S. Capitol," noted author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi. "If these people were Black... well, we all know what would be happening right now to them."

In an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, newly sworn-in Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) agreed, saying that "had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and Brown, we wouldn't have made it up those steps. We wouldn't have made it to be able to get into the door and bust windows and go put our feet up on the desks of Congress members."

"It was white privilege, and it was the call of our president and it was encouraged by our Republican colleagues," said Bush, who on Wednesday said she would introduce a resolution calling for the expulsion of GOP lawmakers whom she accused of inciting the violence.

Condemning Wednesday's attack as "domestic terrorism at its worst," human rights advocate Martin Luther King III—whose father was assassinated for championing Black lives and opposing what he called the "evil triplets" of racism, militarism, and materialism—told 9 News Australia that the police reaction to the Trumpist "treason" was "white privilege on steroids." 

"If you look at how Black Lives Matter demonstrations—peaceful demonstrations—have been handled, and how these individuals were able to get into the Capitol... and offices of Congress members, this is perplexing," said King. "And it's all because the president called for it. Under a different set of circumstances, he would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." 

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The Insurrection Was Predictable

Yesterday’s events were the expression of a dangerous authoritarian movement that has been long in the making.
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Jon Cherry / Getty Images)

Two months ago, we published a series of reports on the growing threat of a coup attempt, wondering why it wasn’t being taken more seriously by Democrats and the media. We were scoffed at and eye-rolled, as if such things could never happen in America.

Nobody is scoffing or eye-rolling anymore, after Wednesday’s events at the US Capitol. There, insurrectionists stormed the building and halted the certification of the national election, as security forces allowed them to breach the Senate chamber and shut down the proceedings. There was a notable difference in the way federal security forces met last year’s Black Lives Matter protests with a show of force, and the way they allowed the Capitol to be overrun by right-wing authoritarians that they knew were coming.

About a decade ago, I wrote a book called The Uprising, which described how we were entering an era of chaos in which right-wing groups would try to seize power under the guise of populism. Clearly, that has been happening — we saw it speed up during the Tea Party backlash, and it was further accelerated by Donald Trump, who is a unique president in his willingness to use the White House megaphone to foment and destabilize.

Wednesday’s events were the result of all that incitement. It was a culmination that happened inside a culture of total impunity— and it is worth considering five points of context to understand what we’re really dealing with here, because it will likely continue after Trump leaves the White House.

We have long known that the far right — and specifically many Trump supporters — are hostile to democracy. Polling data from Monmouth University in 2019 found that about one-third of the strongest supporters of Trump scored in the highest ratings for authoritarian tendencies. In all, Democracy Fund data show that roughly one-third of Americans “say that an authoritarian alternative to democracy would be favorable.” That’s what was on display Wednesday.

While Trump has tried to blame violence on the Left, his administration has been trying to downplay the threat of right-wing authoritarianism and white supremacy. In a whistleblower complaint, a former top Homeland Security official alleged that Trump officials ordered him to modify an agency report’s section “on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe.” Politico reported earlier this year that Homeland Security officials have “waged a years-long internal struggle to get the White House to pay attention to the threat of violent domestic extremists” — but they gave up because Trump wasn’t interested. Instead, federal security forces were focusing on deporting immigrants and investigating environmental activists.

The Capitol Police have a $460 million budget and 2,300 personnel to guard the US Capitol complex. For comparison, that is twice the size of the budget of my own city’s police department, which is used to secure an entire metropolis. Somehow, this army of Capitol security forces was unable — or unwilling — to stop insurrectionists from breaching the building and taking over the floor of the US Senate. And it’s not like they were caught by surprise — they had advance warning of the potential for unrest. So it’s almost as if they weren’t trying to stop the mayhem.

Washington mayor Muriel Bowser’s request to send National Guard reinforcements to the Capitol was initially rejected by the Defense Department — the same department whose leadership was recently purged and then replaced with Trump loyalists. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence, considering Trump initially refused to call for the insurrectionists to disperse.
The insurrection clearly fed off months of misinformation by Republican Party officials who continued to push the lie that the national election was plagued by fraud. Those lies spread: a survey last month found that three-quarters of Republican voters believe the election was fraudulent. Even though nobody has produced evidence of systemic fraud, Republican lawmakers in Washington continued to fuel the conspiracy theories, ultimately pressing Congress to overturn the national election. One photo caught Missouri senator Josh Hawley raising a fist to the oncoming insurrectionists as he headed to the Capitol to try to halt the certification of the election.


From our Francis Chung, Sen. Josh Hawley greeting protesters in the east side of the Capitol before riots began. pic.twitter.com/I8DjBCDuoP
— Manuel Quinones (@ManuelQ) January 6, 2021


As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican Party officials who fueled and abetted this insurrection did so because they assume they will experience no political, social, or legal consequences for their behavior. On the contrary, they will likely be rewarded with higher approval ratings and support from many Republican voters. And if the Look Forward Not Backward™ crowd gets its way and makes sure there are no legal consequences for any of Trump’s many crimes, then these Republicans will know they have a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card for their own extremist behavior.

After all of this, if nothing changes, then I tend to agree with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s aide Dan Riffle, who today said that “it always — even in moments like this — can get worse. If recent history is any guide, it almost certainly will.”


But things can still change — and they must.

In The Uprising, I argued that the best way to counter the rise of right-wing populism and to prevent it from proliferating is for an opposition movement and party to not just issue vague paeans to democracy and the soul of the nation. The opposition must also deliver tangible, material gains for working people — rather than continuing to be an elite and effete caretaker of a let-them-eat-cake establishment that right-wing provocateurs can forever burn in effigy.

The New Deal delivering such gains to the working class helped tamp down the outbreak of right-wing fascism in America. Nearly a century later, the Georgia elections this week proved the same point. There, two right-wing Republican authoritarians were defeated by the black reverend who runs Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s church and by a Jewish guy — and the Democratic duo won by relentlessly campaigning on a simple promise to deliver $2,000 checks to millions of Georgians facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy.

Of course, no matter what Democrats might deliver — survival checks, a higher minimum wage, guaranteed medical care, massive investments in job creation, a crackdown on abusive corporations — there will always be a right-wing authoritarian movement in America willing to weaponize racism and illiberalism for its cause.

So it’s not simple: there is not a straightforward one-to-one relationship between enacting policies that improve people’s lives and instantly snuffing out the kind of fascism that reared its head at the Capitol on Wednesday. But delivering for millions of people who’ve been economically pulverized for generations is the best and probably only way to try to halt fascism’s wider spread to more of the general population over the long haul.

That work must begin now.

Not tomorrow. Not in a few months.

Right now.


Conversation

Manuel Quinones
@ManuelQ
From our Francis Chung, Sen. Josh Hawley greeting protesters in the east side of the Capitol before riots began.
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Ted Cruz faces fierce blowback after his objection to Joe Biden’s victory and riot at the U.S. Capitol

Wednesday’s chaos led to calls for Cruz’s resignation from Texas Democrats. But Cruz says he “ain’t going anywhere.”

BY ALEX SAMUELS AND PATRICK SVITEK 

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, during a committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in September of 2020. Credit: Erin Schaff/Pool via REUTERS

Two nights before the Electoral College certification in Congress, Ted Cruz was in vintage form.

The junior U.S. senator from Texas was calling in to a friendly conservative radio host — Mark Levin — and setting up Wednesday’s vote to be the kind of intraparty line in the sand that has powered his political rise.

By then, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had made clear that he opposed objections to certifying Joe Biden’s election as the next president. But Cruz and 10 other GOP senators announced they would still object unless Congress agreed to an “emergency audit” of the presidential election results.

Cruz told Levin that there were some conservatives “who in good conscience” disagree with his view of Congress’ role in certifying the presidential election results, and that he had talked to them and did not fault them. On the other hand, Cruz said, there were “some Republicans who are not conservatives but who are piously and self-righteously preening” when it comes to the issue.

In spearheading the group of objectors, Cruz arguably upstaged U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who announced his plan to object three days earlier — and, like Cruz, is considered a potential 2024 presidential contender.

But on Wednesday, what Cruz might have thought was a savvy political play took an alarming turn: Supporters of President Donald Trump stormed and ransacked the U.S. Capitol while lawmakers were considering Cruz’s objection. Three people suffered medical emergencies during the siege and died; their deaths were in addition to another woman who was shot by a Capitol police officer.

Cruz denounced the violence but incurred a fierce backlash from critics in both parties, who said his drive to question the election results — and appease the president and his supporters ahead of a possible 2024 run — helped fan the flames of anger among Trump supporters. Prominent Texas Democrats called for him to resign. Many others suggested he’d played an inciting role in one of the darkest days in modern American history.

Politically, it was a high-stakes distillation of GOP tactics in the era of Trump.


In recent months, Cruz has positioned himself as one of the most prominent and vocal Trump supporters casting doubt on the election. Two days after Election Day, Cruz charged that Philadelphia officials were not allowing election observers to watch the counting of votes in the swing state, even though Trump’s lawyers conceded that they had been allowed in the room.

In December, Trump asked Cruz if he would be willing to argue a long shot case filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to invalidate the election results in states like Pennsylvania in the event that it reached the U.S. Supreme Court. (Cruz agreed, but the high court ultimately said Texas did not have standing to bring the case.)

And in the days ahead of Wednesday’s certification, Cruz raised concerns about how many people believed fraud had occurred in the election, without acknowledging the role he had played in encouraging those beliefs

“We’ve seen in the last two months unprecedented allegations of voter fraud,” Cruz said in an early January interview on Fox News. “And that’s produced a deep, deep distrust of our democratic process across the country. I think we in Congress have an obligation to do something about that.”

But people in both parties have questioned his motives.

“Proposing a commission at this late date — which has zero chance of becoming reality — is not effectively fighting for President Trump,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, tweeted. “It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy.”

As people stormed the Capitol building, Cruz insisted on Twitter that violence “is ALWAYS wrong” and called the attack a “despicable act of terrorism and a shocking assault on our democratic system.”

“Those engaged in violence are hurting the cause they say they support,” he said.

He did not, however, withdraw his objections to the Election Day results.

It didn’t help that Cruz on Wednesday was fundraising off his Electoral College challenge, with some money-seeking texts hitting phones as Trump supporters wreaked havoc at the Capitol. (An aide to Cruz said the messages were sent “from a firm” and not approved by Cruz to be sent.) To Cruz’s critics, including those within his own party, it was emblematic of the kind of naked political ambition that they have long abhorred about him.

“The Cruz effort had nothing to do with making some determination of whether or not there was fraud to reverse the outcome of the election and only to do with 2024 and the presidential primary,” said Jerry Patterson, a Republican former state land commissioner who is open about his unhappiness with Trump, but conceded that he’s voted for Cruz in past elections.

“That’s why I could never get back into politics anymore. I’m sick and tired of the bullshit. And that’s what it was,” he said.

The episode not only gave fodder to Cruz’s longtime intraparty detractors but also fellow Republicans.

“You have some senators who, for political advantage, were giving false hope to their supporters [and] misleading them to believe somehow yesterday’s actions in Congress could reverse the results of the election,” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas who is also seen as a possible 2024 contender, said in a TV appearance on Fox without directly naming Cruz. “That was never going to happen yet these senators, as insurrectionists literally stormed the Capitol, were sending out fundraising emails.”

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 nominee for president, raised similar frustrations on the Senate floor Wednesday night, without mentioning Cruz or other objectors by name

“I ask my colleagues: Do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our Republic, the strength of our democracy and the cause of freedom? What is the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience?”

To be clear, Cruz received backup from his own party. While his initial coalition did not hold, he was still joined by several colleagues in objecting to the certification of the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Dozens of House members, including many Texans, also objected in both cases.

The state’s senior senator, John Cornyn, split decisively from Cruz, announcing he would not object in a lengthy letter to Texans on Tuesday, specifically pooh-poohing Cruz’s emergency audit proposal. That contrast in particular heartened some Cruz supporters.

“Ted Cruz will be a stronger force in the Texas GOP than John Cornyn because of the way he has handled the last 30 days and because he doesn’t answer to the same political elite that Cornyn does,” said Luke Macias, a consultant for some of the Texas Legislature’s farthest-right members. “Democrats’ insane calls for Cruz to step down have only made him politically stronger.”

Democrats, meanwhile, were apoplectic over his role. Two of the state’s best-known Democrats, Joaquin and Julián Castro, called on Cruz to resign, as did the state Democratic Party. Cruz’s old nemesis Beto O’Rourke emailed supporters calling for “accountability and consequence” against the Texas senator, who defeated O’Rourke in a Senate race in 2018.

“Sen. Cruz, you must accept responsibility for how your craven, self-serving actions contributed to the deaths of four people yesterday. And how you fundraised off this riot,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York. “Both you and Senator Hawley must resign. If you do not, the Senate should move for your expulsion.”

In Cruz’s Houston hometown, activists lined the streets on Thursday, calling for his resignation while standing outside of a downtown skyscraper that houses one of Cruz’s offices.

But to detractors asking him to leave Congress, Cruz responded curtly Thursday afternoon, “Sorry, I ain’t going anywhere.”

While Cruz himself doesn’t appear to have any regrets for his role in inciting an insurrection — on Thursday he said he would do it all over again if he had to — his colleagues might not easily forgive under a new presidential administration.

Patterson, for one, thinks Cruz’s future political prospects hinge on where Republicans go in the next four years — and whether they remain loyal to Trump.

“There was a reset yesterday of politics in America — at least I hope and pray there was,” Patterson said.

Disclosure: The University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.


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